Use of Twitter #Hashtags for Authors

When I first began building my author platform, I knew that one of the major social networks that I would need to use is Twitter. At first, I found this social media giant to be bewildering. It is a complex network of tiny conversations, ideas, links and news about everything and anything on the planet. Words were shortened into acronyms to save space. Ideas needed to be conveyed in only 140 characters. It was not long before I realized that Twitter has a sort of code, a language all of its own, that I needed to learn in order to use it properly. This code is known as #hashtags.

A #hashtag is a word starting with the # symbol that Twitter will pick up as a subject in its search engine. It is a sort of code that helps to group tweets based on an agreed meaning by a group of people. It is more powerful than simply allowing Twitter to pick up a subject based on what words are in the tweet. There are thousands of #hashtags used on Twitter and they are constantly evolving. Try and limit your use of #hashtags to no more than two or three at the most per tweet. You will get better results that way. I want to focus on ones that are commonly used by writers to bring attention their tweets and more traffic to their websites.

The first group of #hashtags you need to know are related to books and reading. Use these to find new readers for your books and stories, not just fellow writers. My favorites of this list are #books, #bookreview and #novel. I use them frequently to highlight the authors that I interview and the book reviews that I write.

This next group of #hashtags are used to connect with other writers. I try and do two or three tweets a day about how and where I’m writing during the day. When I do, I include one of these favorite #hashtags at the end of the tweet: #amwriting, #amrevising, #Nanowrimo, and #writing. When I started to use these #hashtags, I noticed far more feedback from my tweets about writing than when I did not use any #hashtags at all. I use #Nanowrimo mainly in October and November only when I am participating in the program, the others are general use.

There are also two #hashtags that I want to highlight that are used when you do a post that lists people that are either new followers or followers that you want to promote in your Twitter feed who are also writers. These promotion posts for writers are typically done on Wednesday and the practice is known as “Writer Wednesday”. The #hashtag code is known as either #writerwednesday or #WW. If you want to add new authors and writers to your twitter feed, searching for either of these #hashtags on Wednesday is a great way to find them.

This next group of #hashtags are for highlighting your ebook announcements. If you are posting about a link to Amazon, your smashwords store, or promoting a KPD ebook giveaway, using these #hashtags will allow people outside of your followers to find you.

There are genre and specialty #hashtags that help readers and other writers who share your own literary interests find your tweets. They are rather self-explanatory. I like to use these with author interviews to let the reader know what genre the highlighted author writes in, but they are also good to use with book promotions.

This final group of #hashtags are for marketing and general promotions. Of these, I find the most useful one to be #novelines. Use this #hashtag when you are putting down a short quote of your own novel as a tweet.

#Hashtags are constantly evolving on Twitter. What is popular today could be gone tomorrow. As you chat with your fellow writers at forums or in writing’ groups, ask what #hashtags they are using. You’ll be sure to find new ones to add to your Twitter tool kit.